The callow,
ambitious, envy-ridden author of “A Poetical Epistle To Doctor Sterne [,]
Parson Yorick [,] And Tristam Shandy” is James Boswell, still three years from
meeting Dr. Johnson. He wasn’t alone in being star-struck by Laurence Sterne.
One year earlier, at age forty-five, Sterne published the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman. Seven
more followed in the next seven years. This most eccentric of novels, at once
learned, salacious, philosophically sophisticated and playful (Schopenhauer
loved it; Nietzsche claimed it was his favorite novel and said Sterne was "familiar with everything from the sublime to the rascally"), the unlikely offspring of Rabelais and Burton, made Sterne a
celebrity in London society. Dr. Johnson later told Boswell, “Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last,” and the
book still has its grim detractors (whose objections sound remarkably like those
expressed by Nabokov’s early and late critics). Since I first read it more than forty years
ago, Tristram Shandy, with Ulysses,
Moby-Dick and Pale Fire, has remained one of my favorite works of fiction, one I
reread every few years.

After that first reading in 1971, I was assigned to write
a lengthy paper about it on a subject of my choice. I had noted, despite its
relentless comedy, the book’s death-haunted quality. Like his creator, Tristram
Shandy was dying. The later volumes read like a race with death, an endlessly digressive
prevarication to hold off the inevitable. I had discovered Hugh Kenner around
this time and read for the first time The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (1962). He noted that Joyce considered Sterne an
Irishman. Elsewhere, I read that Joyce said Swift and Sterne ought to have
switched names. Kenner writes in passing in his Joyce chapter:

“Laurence
Sterne availed himself of a hundred devices totally foreign to the storyteller
but made possible by the book alone: not only the blank and marbled pages, the
suppressed chapters represented only by headings, the blazonry of punctuation
marks and the mimetic force of wavy lines, but also the suppression of
narrative suspense—a suspense proper to the storyteller who holds us by
curiosity concerning events unfolding in time—in favor of a bibliographic
suspense which depends on our knowledge that the book in our hands is of a
certain size and that the writer therefore has somehow reached the end of it—by
what means? Nothing more completely separates typographic from oral narrative
than the fact that, as we turn the pages, we can literally see the ending
coming.”

In my
paper, I quoted this passage out of context, though I still suspect Kenner was also
referring to the race-with-death theme when he says “we can literally see the
ending coming.” Sterne died on March 18, 1768, at age sixty-four. The author of
the most protracted birth in literary history was born on this date, Nov. 24,
in 1713.